I'll be moving my blog to www.aaronfeng.com, please update your feed.

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It always annoyed me that there is no way to output schema to a file from SQL 2005 Management Studio. It has the the basic functionality to script out simple objects like table, or database (just the creation of the database itself, nothing in it), but you have to do one object at a time. On top of that, there is no way to output the data into a script ......

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There has been a lot of “buzz” around Ruby on Rails for a while now. I have been following it since it hit the street. I have to admit I have not done much with Rails except for reading and dreaming about it, but I hope to work with it someday. However, in the back of my mind, I always wondered if I could build a real world application using ......

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As described in the WiX (Windows Installer XML) tutorial, upgrades can be categorized into three following categories: Small Updates: Very small changes to existing files. Version number stays the same. Minor Ugrades: Small changes, but no new files are added or removed. Change the the version number (most likely, change the minor or the build). Major ......

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Recently I got a chance to play around with the Data Protection Application Programming Interface (DPAPI). With .NET 2.0 installed, you can encrypt your Web.config just by using aspnet_regiis.exe on the command line. aspnet_regiis.exe -pe "connectionStrings" -app “/YourWebSite” –prov "DataProtectionConfiguratio... You can read ......

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You can buy almost anything on Amazon, ranging from books to hairdryers. Now you can even buy your milk! Check it out for yourself. Read the comments and look at the images, it is funny as hell. It is probably a joke, but it is still funny. ......

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A couple of weeks ago, I saw a documentary on HBO called Hacking Democracy. As software developersbg, we all know there are tons of crappy software out there. I could not believe how terrible the supposedly “high tech” and “top secret” voting machine software actually is. You do not have to be geeky to understand the documentary. ......

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Last week, we noticed our data grid (an Infragistics UltraGrid) was behaving very slow during data population and filtering. At first I assumed we were doing something wrong in our code to cause the slow down. After a few minutes of poking around I did not see anything obvious. Someone noticed the equals method was called frequently when the data is ......

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Recently I decided to check out the beta version of Agile Web Development with Rails book, which is targeted to be released this fall. It is very interesting that the authors also brought agility into book writing. It allows readers to provide feedback to new material during the development of the book. I am also glad to see that the migration part ......

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We finally moved into our highly anticipated new office space. It was designed to be friendly with plenty of white boards and space to move around. The whole back wall in our development area can be used as a white board, so we no longer have to erase our designs until they are no longer needed. In our old office, all the developers were packed into ......

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After a month of a busy schedule, I finally have time to go though my blog aggregator today. I noticed a few people in my feed mentioned this interesting article. If you have not read it yet, go read it. I think this guy is smoking something, but you can be the judge ......

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Retrospectives are a way for a software development teams to discuss and figure out ways to resolve issues when an increment of work is done. The strength of the retrospective comes from focusing on the team members and how to improve as a team. For the team I am working on, the increment of work just so happens to be one week. Our retrospective definitely ......

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Logging is one of those things where once you have it, you never really pay much attention to it. Today I decided to investigate what is new in the logging world since the last time I looked at it. I heard of NLog some time ago, but never took the time to test drive it. In the past I have always used log4net, so I decided to compare NLog to it. Here ......

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For anyone doing Test Driven Development, mocks (stubs) are commonly used. Whether you hand roll your own mocks, or use a mock framework like Rhino Mocks, stubs are used to in order to isolate the code we want to test. Before we can isolate our code, proper separations of concerns are required; such as implementing the Model View Controller or Model ......

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Like many teams, we always fine tune our process, so we can consistently be better. Steve Eichert has a great post that describes our process in detail. In addition to what Steve described, we also play a game that I feel has become part of our process. We call it “the leader game”. A person is chosen to be the “leader” for the iteration. The “leader” ......

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